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Amazon deal confirmed - Windows XP not included

8 Sep 2008

Thursday's news that Amazon will be running G1G1 v2 starting in late November certainly made quite a splash. I've seen north of 50 news-stories on news.google.com and within 24 hours we also had two major Austrian news-organisations inquire about the details at OLPC Austria.

No Windows XP for G1G1 v2

While details on major questions such as price are still unknown we've now received confirmation about another issue that had many people (and journalists) confused: the G1G1 laptops available via Amazon will be using Sugar, there will be no dual-boot or Windows XP version.

The details emerged in an announcement posted to wiki.laptop.org by OLPC's Product Manager Kim Quirk on Saturday:

"As it has been reported, One Laptop per Child will sell its XO Laptop on Amazon.com in late 2008 as part of a global 'Give One, Get One' (G1,G1) program. Although the first iteration of the 'G1,G1' program was extremely successful and sold more then 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated. Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.

In addition, contrary to some media reports, it will be a Linux-based XO Laptop that will be offered as part of the global initiative and not a dual-boot machine running both Windows and Linux." (emphasis mine)

What immediatedly struck me when reading the announcement was the mention of "a global 'Give One, Get One' (G1,G1) program". But before you get too excited (like I initially did) you have to realize that G1G1 2007 was also "global" in the sense that the given-laptops went to children all across the globe. This could be just a minor linguistic detail however it could potentially also be an indication of G1G1 v2 (as it's now apparently called) being available outside the United States.

In the end I believe that this is about as much information as we're going to get before the marketing campaign leading up to the actual start in late November takes off. And that of course leaves plenty of time for rumours and speculations...

Winter, it is my understanding that everyone at OLPC / Sugar Labs is currently working serious overtime to get the 8.2 software release finished on time so it can be loaded onto the XOs produced for G1G1 v2. 8.2 contains some significant improvements and changes with regard to the interface, you can find more information in the accompanying release notes at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.0

- Sugar seems to be more responsive in general.
- There are nice improvements in the application starter screen (e.g. simple list view of activities & ring view of activities) and the wifi network screen (displays a star on the AP which has been already used)
- The wifi radio can actually be powered down using the new control panel. This is very useful when you use the XO as an ebook reader, it saves a lot of power.
- Deep suspend can be activated by simply pushing the power button (no need for closing the lid)
- Deep suspend now only consumes 0.5W (~40hrs on a fully charged battery)
- The XO now seems to remember which OS was last booted (if you use a dual boot setup). So if you use your SD card based Ubuntu daily and boot Sugar only sometimes, you don't have to worry about the game keys at startup.

All in all, there are marked improvements, so the second G1G1 users may get a usable computer, unlike the users of the first one.

It is very unfortunate, that these developments got late almost by a year. A lot of original G1G1ers has lost faith in the project in the meantime.

@Luis Gustavo Lira:
"...now Peru will be the first country which will use Windows XP and Office XP on all XOs !!!!!!"

Sorry, I cannot read the original.

However, I would wonder how the XO can actually run MS Office on XP? Do you REALLY mean OFFICE, which is extremely bloated and expensive? Or would they mean a slimmed down version of MS Works? Which MS tend to include on mini-notebooks.

It would be interesting to see how XP runs on the XO in the field. And how long it stays up when connected to the internet. The general opinion seems to be that XP connected to the internet lasts around 12 minutes, maybe more on a slow link, before the computer is zombified.

"This announcement has dominated the discussion on the Sur mailing list and
has given rise to fear, uncertainty, and the spreading of much
misinformation about GNU/Linux and Sugar. For example, it was posted
to the list that one needed Windows in order to run Java and Flash
programs and that one had to weigh the Write Activity against the
hundreds of educational programs available for Windows. All that has
been announced so far is a pilot; Per├║ remains committed to Sugar and
FOSS."